Photo by Meg Haywood Sullivan, courtesy of National Geographic.

I’m not much of a traveler. There are few places I want to travel to. There’s just too much to see close to home. And I’m not in a rush. I plan to live to be two hundred and two, so I have time. Maybe when I’m done exploring around here I’ll finally get to go there, “wherever there may be.” Paris, maybe. Rio. Parts of India. The not so hot parts. Japan, specifically the island of Kyushu for some reason. I wouldn’t mind giving Honshu the skip. I have no interest in seeing Tokyo, although I hear Kyoto’s nice. And I probably should try to make a point of seeing Mount Fuji while I’m there but it wouldn’t break my heart if it didn’t pan out. When I read Paul Theroux’s descriptions of winter on Hokkaido in Ghost Train to the Eastern StarI thought I might like to go there:

Across the high Hokkaido moorland, the sun disengaged from a puffy storm cloud and suddenly brightened, changed color, going hotter, the dazzling orange of hot lava, then became a low yellow dome near the frosty hills on the horizon. I watched the diminishing dome: it slid finally into the snow, leaving a glow in the storm cloud, a pinkness, a blush above the ridge of hills, until it became just a smear of pink, going gray.

After that, the bare black trees were like exposed nerves in the ashy whiteness of the bleak snowfields at dusk. In this rounded, softened, and heavily upholstered world of deep snow, the pinetops changed from ragged lace to bottle brushes to saw blades as the train turned on the meandering river and the angle of the light altered.

Five and a half hours after leaving Sapporo, the train drew into the tiny station of the topmost town in Japan.

It seemed a magical arrival---the little station, the snowy streets, the deep drifts sparkling in the lamplight, frost crystals in the air and a strong odor of the sea…

But as often happens when I read Theroux’s travel writing, the farther on I read the more I felt like I’d be happier just staying home. He can grow sour on a place in a heartbeat and he has a talent for passing that sourness along to a reader.

But as for home---and I mean the United States---I would like to visit New Mexico, get back another time or two to New Orleans, maybe do some poking around up in Montana. But there’s really just one place I feel like I have to see.

Yosemite.

At some point when I was most vulnerable to it---and I think it was back when we were living in Fort Wayne and I was especially depressed by the flatness of the place---I read John Muir’s My First Summer in the Sierra and The Yosemite and I was enchanted. I had to go!

Sadly, I haven’t gotten around to it yet. I’m not anxious. Like I said, I have time. Fourteen decades at least. But that’s just if all I want to see is bare rock. The glaciers and with them the grass and the trees that drink the runoff will be long gone by then. If I want to see the glaciers, I need to get out there fast. Within five years, according to Caroline Gleich in this article she wrote for National Geographic, Is It Too Late to Save Yosemite’s Glaciers?

Gleich, a professional ski mountaineer (I’m not sure either), adventurer (nice work if you can get it, but I wonder what it pays and how much insurance you have to carry), and environmental activist, went out with her friend, the photographer Meg Haywood Sullivan to take a look at the Lyell Glacier while it’s still there to be looked at. The great naturalist John Muir discovered the glaciers of the Sierras for white people in the last third of the Nineteenth Century and deduced the process by which the glaciers had gouged out the canyons and shaped the cliffs of that part of the Sierras that now make up Yosemite National Park. Muir posited that the glaciers were still at work. He was going against the scientific consensus of his day on this, by the way. According to Edwin Way Teale in a note before Muir’s essay “Discovery of the Sierra Glaciers” (collected in The Wilderness World of John Muir, edited by Teale), eminent geologists at the time believed that there were no “living” glaciers in Yosemite Valley and the cliffs and mountainscapes had been formed by some as yet scientifically unexplained cataclysm in which, in the words of David Brower in his introduction to my copy of The Yosemite, "the bottom dropped out" of the unformed valley,"leaving the walls." Muir, Brower says, "would have none of it." The eminent geologists didn’t like Muir’s proving them wrong. Muir, on the other hand, thoroughly enjoyed having done it. But, as Gleich reports in her article, those living glaciers are dying and they’re not doing it at glacial speed.

Gleich:

As we hiked, I tried to imagine what Muir saw in the summer of 1872. He went to the Lyell Glacier because he suspected that glaciers were responsible for shaping the iconic landscape of Yosemite. He placed pine stakes at the lip of the glacier to measure movement. His adventure and experiment showed the glacier was “alive” and moving, upsetting the predominant theory that Yosemite was shaped by a major earthquake. In 1875 he published his findings in a Harper’s Magazine article, “The Living Glaciers of California.” Essentially one of the first conservation adventure athletes, Muir used his platform to advocate permanent protection of Yosemite, convincing President Theodore Roosevelt to accompany him on a camping trip there in May 1903. The men “talked far into the night regarding Muir’s glacial theory of the formation of Yosemite Valley ... they talked a great deal about the conservation of forests in general and Yosemite in particular.” The discussion sparked plans for the “setting aside of other areas in the United States for park purposes,” and Roosevelt eventually preserved 230 million acres of public lands. It seemed fitting that Meg and I would be in Yosemite for the National Park Service’s centennial. But it was crazy to think that our generation could be the last to see the park’s glaciers firsthand.

Here’s what Muir saw:

Beginning on the northwestern extremity of the group, I explored the chief tributary basins in succession, their moraines, roches moutonnées, and splendid glacier pavements, taking them in regular succession without any reference to the time consumed in their study. The monuments of the tributary that poured its ice from between Red and Black Mountains I found to be the most interesting of them all; and when I saw its magnificent moraines extending in majestic curves from the spacious amphitheater between the mountains, I was exhilarated with the work that lay before me. It was one of the golden days of the Sierra Indian summer, when the rich sunshine glorifies every landscape however rocky and cold, and suggests anything rather than glaciers. The path of the vanished glacier was warm now, and shone in many places as if washed with silver. The tall pines rowing on the moraines stood transfigured in the glowing light, the poplar groves on the levels of the basin were masses of orange-yellow, and the late blooming goldenrods added gold to gold.

Pushing on over my rosy glacial highway, I passed lake after lake set in solid basins of granite, and many a thicket and meadow watered by a stream that issues from the amphitheater and links the lakes together; now wading through plushy bogs knee-deep in yellow and purple sphagnum; now passing over bare rock. The main lateral moraines that bounded the view on either hand are from 100 to nearly 200 feet high, and about as regular as artificial embankments, and covered with a superb growth of Silver Fir and Pine. But this garden and forest luxuriance was speedily left behind. The trees were dwarfed as I ascended; patches of the alpine bryanthus and cassiope began to appear, and arctic willows pressed into flat carpets by the winter snow. The lakelets, which a few miles down the valley were so richly embroidered with flowery meadows, had here, at an elevation of 10,000 feet, only small brown mats of carex, leaving bare rocks around more than half their shores. Yet amid this alpine suppression the Mountain Pine bravely tossed his storm-beaten branches on the ledges and buttresses of Red Mountain, some specimens being over 100 feet high, and 24 feet in circumference, seemingly as fresh and vigorous as the giants of the lower zones.

Evening came on just as I got fairly within the portal of the main amphitheater. It is about a mile wide, and a little less than two miles long. The crumbling spurs and battlements of Red Mountain bound it on the north, the somber, rudely sculptured precipices of Black Mountain on the south, and a hacked, splintery col , curving around from mountain to mountain, shuts it in on the east.

I chose a camping-ground on the brink of one of the lakes where a thicket of Hemlock Spruce sheltered me from the night wind. Then, after making a tin-cupful of tea, I sat by my camp-fire reflecting on the grandeur and significance of the glacial records I had seen. As the night advanced the mighty rock walls of my mountain mansion seemed to come nearer, while the starry sky in glorious brightness stretched across like a ceiling from wall to wall, and fitted closely down into all the spiky irregularities of the summits. Then, after a long fire side rest and a glance at my note-book, I cut a few leafy branches for a bed, and fell into the clear, death-like sleep of the tired mountaineer.

Gleich again:

Glaciers are more than a playground for skiers and climbers; they are significant to the world, and it’s vital to pay attention to what’s happening to them. For 85 years, the park service has conducted annual surveys of the Lyell and Maclure Glaciers. The results of the most recent studies are shocking. The glaciers have lost about 80 percent of their surface area.

“The reason glaciers are good indicators of climate change is because they are simple. Snowfall and temperature are the only two things that control a glacier's health. So if you have less snow or warmer temperatures, the glaciers are going to retreat,” explains Greg Stock, a Yosemite National Park glaciologist.

In Yosemite, the Lyell and Maclure Glaciers form the headwaters of the Tuolumne River, providing drinking water to more than two million people in the Bay Area. Once the glaciers disappear, the ecosystems downstream are bound to change. In other places in the world, like China, Bolivia, and the Alps, melting glaciers provide a significant source of freshwater for large communities. Globally, the loss of glaciers means many communities will lose their water source.

“The other part,” Stock says, “is more philosophical. Glaciers were foundational in creating this landscape that’s so famous. When the glaciers disappear, we’ll lose the physical links to the past and the tangible link to the past study of glaciers from John Muir on—the hundreds of people involved in studying these glaciers over a century and a half.”

A couple decades of sustained cold temperatures and above-normal snowfall would rejuvenate the glaciers, Stock says. They’d be able to form more ice, and the weight of the additional ice would start pushing them down the mountain again. But sadly, it may be too late. “Even if we were to stop emitting greenhouse gases [a cause of global warming] today, both of those glaciers would disappear in the next few decades. If the drought conditions of the past five years continue, the Lyell could be gone in five years. It’s that close,” Stock says. “There’s so much inertia in the system, the warming will continue for decades.”

That wasn’t the answer I wanted to hear. I was hoping we could save them, to protect them for future generations. Stock says people can still act to prevent this from happening on a larger scale. “We should take individual actions to try to reduce our carbon footprint,” he said, “and we have to be more assertive in climate change policy, and vote for the politicians that fight for strong climate action.”

“The strongest argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with an average voter”?

Or non-voter…

Monday, I’m lying on the table at physical therapy with a heating pad under my back, eyes closed, nearly dozing off, and I overhear two other clients, a man and a woman, talking about the election. They were cheerfully grumpy about it. The man asked that most dangerous question:

“Who are you voting for?”

She replied matter of factly, “I don’t vote.”

She didn’t add “it only encourages them.”

She did say, “They’re all terrible.” By all she meant all. Not just Clinton and Trump. Everyone running in every election, national, state, and local. Politicians of all stripes, all parties, she’s got no use for any of them. She offered no specific objection to politicians as a class nor did she express any particular complaints about specific politicians she hasn’t voted for in the past or won’t be voting for this time (except for Clinton and Trump. I’ll get to that). She didn’t say she thought they were all corrupt or liars or just plain stupid. Her feeling seemed to be that in general they’re all useless.

No politician, as far as she seemed to be concerned, has ever done anybody a lick of good. Politics, again as far as she seemed to be concerned, had pretty much no impact on her life and asking her to care about it enough to use up part of her day to go vote annoyed her, as if she was being told she had to take her car in for a maintenance checkup even though she’d had it in fairly recently and it was running fine and all that was likely to happen if she brought it in would be that the mechanics would find something wrong with it that had to be fixed right then and there or else the warranty agreement would be voided.

Politics and the doings of politicians were at best annoying distractions and, finally, none of her business. Taking time off from work to go vote for any candidate up for any office would be like doing it to go vote for the officers of club she didn’t belong to or the board members of a company she didn’t work for or have stock in. The outcomes wouldn’t affect her and so wouldn’t matter to her one way or another.

At this point I was tempted to jump off the table and walk over to quote our good twitter pal and virtual spiritual adviser Pastor Dan who tweeted just the other day:

If you don’t like politics, turn off your television. And your radio. And your internet. And your lights and water, and your sewer…

I know from having grown up watching Pop Mannion try to explain it to irate taxpayers back when he was town supervisor that the roads don’t plow themselves in the winter and the trucks don’t run on air and the drivers have to be paid and the gas has to be bought that most people don’t understand---or want to understand---that “politics” is just another word for our collective decision-making about how we’re going to live together politely and peacefully without recourse to battle axes and poison and the odd dragon. Few town residents wanted to hear it from Pop and this woman certainly didn’t want to hear it from me

I might have done it, anyway, if I hadn’t been so warm and comfortable on top of the heating pad and if she had actually said the things I wrote about her feelings about politics out loud and I wasn’t just making inferences and thinking I could read her mind.

But I didn’t have to read her mind to know her opinions of Clinton and Trump. She said what they were out loud and emphatically. She doesn’t like either of them, naturally, but her dislike for them goes beyond her usual contempt for politicians as a class. But if she was going to vote, she’d probably vote for Trump. Not with any enthusiasm or satisfaction, of course. She thinks he’s despicable. She can’t put up with all his lying. But Hillary just doesn’t care about people. Look at how she wouldn’t let us bring our troops home.

Which troops from where she and when this happened and how Hillary herself managed this on her own she didn’t say. She’s far from the only person who thinks that the Secretary of State is commander-in-chief of the armed forces or commands her own military units and that she decides foreign and military policy, the president and the joint chiefs taking orders from her. And it doesn’t mark her as a closet Republican or conservative or even a FoxNews watcher that she thinks so. An awful lot of Bernie People seemed to think so during the Democratic primaries. They also appeared to think she was President of the United States for fourteen years, starting in 1993, and that Bill worked for her and W. was only on hand for a few months after 9/11 to cheerlead her taking us into war in Iraq. There was some question as to whether they believed Barack Obama was president before 2015. Never mind. The point is this woman knows Trump is lying scum but Clinton’s heartless and cruel and that’s worse.

Besides, Trump is a businessman.

She figures that means he knows how to run things.

Ok. Before you get to feeling Churchillian about democracy as I did initially, this average non-voter wasn’t a fool. The rest of her conversation with her friend in the waiting area and then with the therapist when she started her session proved she wasn’t.

And the idea that a businessman being qualified to be president just on the grounds that he is a businessman and therefore knows how to run things isn’t...well, all right. It is foolish. But not as foolish as all that.

Let’s pretend that the businessman or woman we’re talking about here isn’t a lying, thieving, cheating, tax-dodging incompetent and fraud and does in fact know how to run things, things being his or her business. In what way does knowing how to run their own particular business make them competent to run the country, or a state or a city, or a town? For that matter, how does knowing how to run their own particular business make them competent to run some other sort of business (he asks innocently, calling into question the whole premise of MBA programs)?

Of course, lots of businesspeople run for public office. Really rich ones are particularly fond of running for governor. They seem to regard governor as an entry level position. But plenty run for other offices too. They run and they win. And as soon as that happens they stop being businesspeople and become politicians and then they have to prove on the job that they’re good at the business of politics. Some turn out to be. But on the whole their record is as mixed as those of politicians who got into politics from any other line of work. So why do people persist in believing that businesspeople are just what the country/state/city/town needs to get things running right? Why are they convinced that having run a business qualifies someone to run a political entity?

Because, to an extent, it does.

Insert banalities about meeting budgets, being able to judge whom to hire and fire, being able to negotiate a good deal, having to get along with all sorts and conditions of men and women, etc.

But those are skills you can pick up in other ways and not all businesspeople have them or cultivate them anyway.

I’m biased on this one because Pop Mannion was good at all those things and he was a physicist and a college professor whose one brief foray into being a businessman did not, let us say, make the family rich. He had been, however, the manager of the computer science department at General Electric’s Knolls Atomic Power Lab and GE’s a business and if you work for a business that sort of makes you a businessman, doesn’t it? He never thought of himself as one, though. He saw himself as a manager and a problem solver and those skills helped make him a successful town supervisor.

And when he was running the town, some of the biggest fools he had to deal with were local businessmen who’d gotten themselves elected to the town board or appointed to the zoning commission or who’d just show up at board meetings to sound off about how the town was being run into the ground, what’s the matter with you politicians, don’t you know what would happen if you tried to run a real business this way?

The issue with them was almost always money.

The town was spending too much of it.

And it was their money, after all.

That’s where the tax money came from. All of it, apparently, at least to hear them tell it. Nobody else worked or paid a dime in taxes.

Guess what party most of them belonged to?

But that’s it, isn’t it? Money. The reason people think businessmen and women make good political leaders is that they know all about money and that’s all politics is, in many voters minds, an organized effort to spend their money on things they don’t think they want or need.

And if politics is only about how the money gets spent, it makes sense that you’d want someone in charge who knows about money. And who knows more about money than people who have to make it first hand? People in business have to be smart about money.

That makes them smart, period.

Not in the way lawyers are smart or doctors are smart or college professors or scientists and engineers or great artists or even baseball managers and football coaches are smart. Smart in the way regular people are smart. Common sensically smart. Smart about practical things. Smart about how things work and how people think and feel. Smart in ways that don’t make regular folks feel dumb.

People think they know what it means to be smart about business. In fact, they’re pretty sure they could be smart themselves in that way, if they had to be and put their minds to it. They may not know how to draw up a contract or design a bridge or translate a poem from an archaic language---they don’t even know why anybody would think it was important or smart to do that---but they’re pretty sure they could run a business. Maybe not a multi-national corporation. But a bar or a restaurant or a corner grocery or a boutique or a small online business.

But even if they don’t trust themselves to run a lemonade stand let alone a car company or even a car wash, they probably know someone who does.

The main reason people feel they know how a business works and they don’t know how politics works---they just have a sense that it doesn’t, at least that it doesn’t work in the way it should, which is to their benefit---is they see businesses at work every day. They rely on their working. And, overall, they do.

Most people work in business or for a business of some kind. If they don’t think of themselves as business people, they know that somewhere in the place business people are hard at work making sure the money’s coming in so that the doors stay open and the payroll’s met---in short, that the place is doing a profitable business. And they know, perhaps only vaguely but possibly in detail, how they themselves contribute to the money making---to the profiting of the business. Meanwhile, most of their daily comings and goings outside their own workplaces take them in and out other businesses and they understand, again perhaps only vaguely but again possibly in detail, how they figure in the money making as customers or clients. They know what they need out of those businesses and they definitely know which of those businesses are providing what they need. The same is true of their friends and neighbors and relatives.

And if they aren’t business people themselves, it’s likely that there are business people among their neighbors and friends and relations. They’re far more likely to know a successful businessperson than, say, a former Secretary of State. Which, among other things, means their everyday conversations are far more likely to be about business and the making (and spending) of money than about foreign policy and statecraft. And money, its getting and spending, weighs heavily on the minds of everyone, including diplomats.

All of this is to say that business and the doings of businesspeople are familiar in ways politics and the doings of politicians are not. That familiarity might breed contempt. In fact, in a lot of people it does. There are people who think my description of a certain currently high-profile businessman above applies to all businessmen and women. They’re all lying, thieving, cheating, tax-dodging incompetents and frauds, in their experience. But it also breeds...comfort.

That’s how they stay in business, but understanding the concerns and serving the needs and interests of their clients and customers in very direct, practical, and immediately useful ways. That makes our concerns, needs, and interests, their concerns, needs, and interests, again in very direct, practical, and immediately useful ways.

So we assume.

But this leads to another thing.

Businesspeople are more in the habit of speaking in the style of us regular folks and about solving problems in the most practical and immediate ways. A thoughtful politician will talk carefully about the practicality of instituting single-payer health care at some do-able point in time. A businessman will happily bluster about fixing the problem right away, taking back the defective product and replacing it with something better immediately and, maddeningly, it will sound to most people like the politician is cold and uncaring and detached from ordinary people’s troubles and concerns and also like she’s lying or at least not telling the whole truth and like the businessman cares more about us and our problems and knows what’s wrong and how to fix it and honestly intends to set right to work fixing it.

What it comes down to is that it’s not really surprising that to the average voters the businessman sounds more like one of them than does the politician, even though he is a lying, thieving, cheating, tax-dodging incompetent and fraud.

And if this doesn’t make you feel Churchillian in your contempt for the average voter, then it probably at least has you sighing along Lincoln that you can fool some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time but in your despair leaving off the completion of the quote because it doesn’t take fooling all the people any of the time to get elected. Did me, anyway.

But like I said, I don’t think the woman at the physical therapist was a fool or even that she was being fooled. I think she just has a lot on her mind, too much to be devoting a lot of thought to politics in general and the two politicians running for president in this election. I have no idea whether or not she thinks about business and businesspeople in the ways I laid out. Odds are she does because I think that’s how most people think. But from her conversations with her friend in the waiting room and with the therapist all I do know is that she was mainly thinking about what I was mainly thinking about while I was there and what all the other clients in the place were mainly thinking about, what we were doing at the moment to try to get better.

She’s gotten hurt in an accident and she was having a hard time doing her job because of it. She wasn’t complaining, just telling the therapist how things had been going since her last visit. It was also Halloween and that was part of her conversations with her friend and the therapist. I could have pointed out how politics affected her recovery and her long-term health care---I don’t know just how bad her injury was or how much it’s disabled her but if Trump’s elected and she changes jobs and she still needs physical therapy or surgery or routine cortisone shots to relieve her chronic pain after he and the Republicans repeal Obamacare and replace it with their “Suck it up or Just Go Die” plan, she’ll find how just in what way he knows how to run things for the better. I could also have pointed out how politics can even affect Halloween. Local politicians routinely have to decide whether or not to postpone trick or treating because of bad weather or other unforeseen circumstances. One year when he was supervisor, Pop Mannion rescheduled Halloween at the urging of parents and teachers in town that the kids shouldn’t be out trick or treating on Sunday night. When we lived in Fort Wayne, a nearby town almost cancelled Halloween altogether because a bloc of Right Wing Christians had gotten themselves elected of the town board and they wanted to put an end to the Satanic ritual of parents sorting through the candy the kids brought home to steal their Reese’s Pieces.

I could have pointed it all out, but I didn’t. I had other things foremost on my own mind. Mainly the same thing that was foremost on her mind, why I was in the place, which, of course, was a place of business, making the head physical therapist who owns it and manages it a businesswoman.

She’s also Oliver Mannion’s one-time soccer coach and the mother of kids Oliver and Ken Mannion went to school with.

Another one mined from the notebooks. June 17, 2016. Posted Wednesday, November 1.

I try not to make election predictions. There’s no percentage in it. I don’t get paid to stir up debate to bring in eyeballs and bump up the clicks so I can’t fail upward. I don’t get rewarded for being wrong because I was wrong in a way that served the business model. All I can be is wrong.

I don’t like being wrong.

The other thing is, I don’t mind not knowing.

Making predictions is a way of fooling yourself into thinking you know.

And I don’t know.

At best, I have an idea.

I have an idea of what’s going on.

Sometimes it’s a pretty good idea.

Usually, however, it’s only a vague one. Often the vaguest idea.

Since he’s become the “presumptive nominee”---I put that in quotes only because I swear this is the first election in my lifetime I’ve heard that phrase used to describe the candidate with enough delegates that their nomination at their party’s convention was pretty much a sure thing. In the past, as far as I can recall, people were content to call them the candidate with enough votes that their nomination’s pretty much a sure thing. Too many words, I guess, to fit on a chyron or in a Tweet.---Since he became the presumptive nominee back in May, honest and self-shamed pundits and analysts have been busy explaining how come they predicted Trump wouldn’t win or, at any rate, how they failed to predict he would. Nate Silver seems to feel especially guilty and in need of offering what sounds almost like an apology.

Since I didn’t predict anything, I don’t have anything to apologize for. But I did have an idea and it wasn’t a vague idea. It was the wrong idea.

I had the idea he would fade.

It chagrins me to keep having to admit this, but for a long while back last year had that idea and held onto it. I expected Trump would fade because I was sure people would get tired of him and his act.

After all, he’s boring.

He bores me, at any rate.

Same song, same jokes, same shtick, delivered the same hammy, obviously overly-pleased with himself way.

But I forgot.

Donald Trump is a clown but he’s also something else. A salesman.

A great one.

Took a while for me to realize the reason I didn’t appreciate his routine was I wasn’t in the market looking to buy what he was selling. I don’t need the brand of snake-oil he’s peddling. I’m not sure what brand that is, maybe because I don’t need it. I like to pride myself on not being a sucker for any brand of political snake oil or patent medicines, homeopathic remedies, or magic cure-alls. Oh, maybe from time to time I’ve reached for the political equivalent a bottle of cold medicine or cough syrup or an aspirin and I think we’re about to overdose on that metaphor. Point is, since I wasn’t buying what he was selling, which from what I could tell from listening with half an ear was the same old Right Wing Republican mixture of resentment, grievance, hatred, anger, fear, and the kind of self-pity that’s hard to distinguish from self-loathing, I found his relentless patter tiresome, and I figured it wouldn’t be long before most Republicans got tired of hearing it too.

There was never a time when I didn’t take him seriously as a dangerous demagogue tapping into the the fears, angers, and hatreds of a significant portion of the Republican base. I knew he’d get a lot of votes and amass delegates. I didn’t think he would win the nomination, but I always thought he could. I didn’t dismiss the polls or ignore the polls. I just didn’t trust them.

Too early to tell, I was saying to myself---and online and to my worried students---well into fall. After all, the polls in the fall of 2008 had Rudy Giuliani and Fred Thompson leading John McCain by wide margins. And the polls now had Ben Carson in second place, and at points even leading. So I figured that as the primaries drew closer and voters really started paying attention one of the guys I was pretty sure would be the nominee--probably Jeb, maybe Rubio, but quite possibly Cruz---would start rising in the polls and Trump along with Carson would plateau and then fade.

I made several mistakes. The first was I was slow to realize just how truly awful a candidate Jeb Bush was.

Then I didn’t look closely at the GOP’s rules for winning the primary so I didn’t know just how few delegates the eventual winner would need and I took it for granted that Trump’s running for a long time at just a little of over a third in the polls wouldn’t get him close enough to the nomination. (As it turned out, he won over half the delegates with significantly less than 50% of the popular vote---1441 and 44.9%, respectively.) And I underestimated just how eager the media would be to help him sell his snake-oil.

But my big mistake was not seeing soon enough what he is.

What else he is.

I saw him for the effective demagogue he is. I saw him for the clown he is. I didn’t see him for the great salesman he is. I didn’t see was that the clowning and the demagoguery were part of a sales pitch. And I didn’t see what he was selling along with the racism and the anger and the hatred.

SUCCESS!

That’s the not-so-secret secret ingredient in the snake oil.

And for most people SUCCESS means money. Lots of it.

Sure, there are other things that go with it. Status, influence, opportunities for fun, further achievement, more money. But those come from having the money and they’re only added perks. Having the money is the point. It’s enough to be rich.

To be rich is to be successful by definition.

Rich, of course, is relative. Lots of people’s idea of rich doesn’t mean being a billionaire or even a millionaire in quantitative terms. It simply means having enough money that you can pay your bills without worrying and fretting and still have plenty left over to spend on having fun and enjoying life. Things get complicated and troublesome when your idea of having fun and enjoying life involves buying lots of expensive toys and luxuries and unnecessary comforts. And unfortunately for their mental health and well-being, most people think rich means RICH. It means being a millionaire or a billionaire...like Donald Trump.

And that’s what Trump has been selling for decades with his books and with his example on The Apprentice, the formula for being rich and successful like Donald Trump.

It’s been an implicit theme of his campaign that as president he will make “us” all rich in that limited, modest way of having just enough money to pay the bills and have some fun---maybe you can’t buy a yacht, but you might buy that speedboat. He doesn’t promise that all those jobs he’s going to bring back will be high-paying, high-status jobs---actually, the Democrats implicitly promise that when they talk up the value of a college education and STEM and working people resent it. They take it as elitists telling them that they’re living their lives wrong and raising their kids to be failures. No, Trump is going to get people good jobs, the best jobs. And for most people that means steady work with decent pay and good benefits.

It’s his version of a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage.

And if Trump stopped there, he truly would be the populist and champion of the working class so many people in the political media seem determined to portray him as.

But he doesn’t stop there.

Trump himself makes it clear he has only one qualification to be president. He’s a SUCCESS!

That’s more than enough, the best qualification, the only one that matters, really. To be successful, to be rich, is to be SMART! And competent. You can’t succeed, you can’t become rich, you can’t make money unless you’re smart and competent, and the more money you have, the smarter and more competent you must be. That’s one of the cons Trump is running on his voters, that he is richer than he is, rich as Croesus, richer than those people, at any rate, the smart guys and women of the political and business elites whose stupidity and incompetence have caused the problems that have to be fixed in order for America to be made great again. Trump, says Trump, over and over again, is the only one smart enough and competent enough to do the job. Need proof? Look at how rich he is! Look at all the things his money has bought him! Never mind what’s in his tax returns. He has a private jet, a big one, a YUGE one!

Like I said, I don’t think most people believe that electing him president will in itself make them rich. But they do expect it will make their lives materially better. If it doesn’t put more money in their pocket, at least it might keep more in it, just by slowing the flow of money out of it. And who knows what might follow from that? When things settle down, when the bills get paid…

Trump is selling that kind of success.

But there are people who want MORE!

They do want to be rich as Croesus. And Trump sells himself as a role model for them. That’s the theme of his books, a theme of The Apprentice, the reason for buying Trump steaks. Model yourself on me, use me as your example, and you too can be a SUCCESS!

If not, well, then, at least you can feel rich by identifying with me, the rich guy.

Now, as it happens, I don’t need to feel rich.

I’d like to be rich, but that’s different. And I definitely need more money.

But if I thought there was a magic medicine that would make me a SUCCESS, that would make me rich or at least put more money in my pocket, I wouldn’t buy it from that rich guy.

It’s not just because as we all now know, he’s probably not that rich and he hasn’t been a success, not the kind of successful businessman he wants us to think he is. His whole career as a businessman has been a decades-long upward fail, enabled by tax breaks and other people’s money and hard work. He’s gotten by, if not truly ahead, by cheating his employees, investors, and partners, screwing the tenants of his many heavily leveraged properties, and conning credulous bankers and government officials. His only truly sustained success has been as the star of a TV show in which he acted the part of a successful businessman named Donald Trump. I never watched The Apprentice so I don’t know how well he acted the part. But it couldn’t have been well enough to fool me into thinking it was the real him.

The fact is I’ve never thought of him as a successful businessman, even back in the 'Eighties when he was doing a pretty good of passing for one and fewer people had caught onto him. He has always looked to me like his idiot sons look to most people now. A spoiled rich kid and playboy, using his money to show off, aggrandize himself, indulge himself, and revenge himself on anyone who got in the way of his satisfying his whims, vanities, and appetites.

In short, I saw him as exactly the monster of ego, desire, and spite Garry Trudeau portrayed him as in Doonesbury.

Which is to say, Trudeau taught me who and what the real Donald Trump was.

Thirty years later, you read those cartoons and you’ll be amazed at how perfectly Trudeau captured him and how early. And at how the portrait’s still fresh.

Of course, that’s not how most people know him and see him. They know him as the character he played on The Apprentice. The tough, no-nonsense, but fair-minded boss named “Donald Trump”, the ultra-rich guy who hadn’t lost the common touch. The kind of boss they’d be if they could be the boss. The kind of rich person they’d be, if (and when) they got rich.

That’s the “Donald Trump” they’re buying the snake oil from. That’s the rich guy they want to be president.

It’s bad enough that people are going to vote for a fictional character without caring that he’s in reality an angry, hateful, ignorant, unscrupulous, irresponsible, racist, sexist, xenophobic monster of ego, appetite, vanity, and spite.

There are two pernicious notions at work that Trump is manipulating and exploiting.

The first is that it’s not enough to get rich. You should already be rich.

Rich is what you’re supposed to be.

Rich is the estate into which all Americans---the right kind of Americans, the good Americans---are meant to be born into or to inherit by God-given right.

So why aren’t you rich?

What went wrong?

What did you do wrong?

What’s wrong with you?

Well, there can’t be anything wrong with me. There must be something wrong with someone else. There must be someone keeping me from getting rich. The system must be rigged against me and I know who’s rigged it.

THEM!

THEY did it!

And Doctor Don calls down from the stage at the back of his wagon, “Of course it was THEM! Of course THEY did it! They tripped you up coming out of the gate. They picked your pockets. They took what you had coming to you. They robbed you. And they’re going to come back for more. Everything you have, that you worked hard for, the SUCCESS that was your due, they’re going to take it.”

That’s one of the roots of their “economic anxiety.” The fear that the little success they have will be taken away by THEM.

The other is that they never will be a SUCCESS, never have that much money.

That’s what the local business owners with the Trump signs in the windows are afraid of. That’s what keeps them late at the store or in the office, has them pacing the lot trying not to look desperate as they watch the couple talking over the SUV they’ll probably decide not to buy. The country’s full of would-be mini-Trumps. Small business owners who think they should have been a SUCCESS by now. Could have been. Should have been. And they’re feeling the time running out on them.

That’s their economic anxiety.

And Doctor Don appears, his arms opening wide. “Fear not,” he says. “Fret not. Just buy my Magic Elixir. Drink it down. The whole bottle. It’s chock full of Vitamin S and Vitamin T. That’s S for SUCCESS and T for ME! Guaranteed to ward off infection by THEM!”

And they buy! They swig it down. Swallow tablespoon after tablespoon. And they get a jolt of confidence with every dose. And along with it come jolts of resentment, anger, hatred, and fear. Followed by a crash, naturally. Doctor Don’s Magic Elixir gives only temporary relief. It’s a stimulant. When the stimulation wears off, depression, self-loathing, and self-doubt return with a vengeance that have to be dispatched with another quick reach for the bottle.

There’s something else in it. A form of self-forgiveness.

Material failure is a sign of moral failure.

If you’re not rich, you haven’t simply done wrong in having made mistakes. You’ve sinned.

Your bad lot in life is proof of your bad character.

This is an article of faith it seems most Americans have inherited from our Calvinist ancestors. It’s fundamental to our self-flattering belief in our Protestant Work Ethic.

Republicans love to preach this sermon. Paul Ryan has written a book as an exegesis. It’s practically the basis of his budget. It frees them from having to care and from having to do anything to help, like pay more in taxes or pay any taxes.

The only way out of poverty, the only way to success, is thorough self-improvement. In other words, shape up! You got yourself into whatever mess you’re in. It’s your responsibility to get yourself out of it. Resolve to be a better person and strive to become one, without whining, without complaint, without expecting someone else to make up for your own bad and foolish behavior and your own moral failures.

It’s on this point Trump breaks ranks with other Republicans by offering something more in the way of forgiveness.

“Ok,” the others say, “Maybe you’re not so bad. Maybe it’s not your fault. Maybe it’s THEM! THEY’RE to blame. You’re paying the price for their bad character. You’re being punished for THEIR sins.”

Trump says all that, of course. Without the maybes. But he adds something the others can’t. An ideal of SUCCESS to identify with and, at least for a moment, the vicarious thrill of feeling SUCCESSFUL.

Back in the spring the New York Times ran a story that described the excitement that shot through the crowd at a Trump rally when his jet flew low overhead.

For that instant, everybody looking up in awe was on board that plane. For a second, they were lifted out of themselves. They weren’t what they were afraid they were, victims of their own moral failure. They were the opposite. They were rich. They were successful. They were...good.

Some time in the late fall of last year I gave up on the idea that Trump would fade. It was clear that he wasn’t. Most of the others were or already had. It was coming down to him and Cruz. By December I’d finally figured out what was in his Magic Elixir that made it addictive and that he had more than enough buyers to carry him to the nomination. By January’s end, there was no more doubt. There’d be no stopping Trump by the Republican establishment. Ted Cruz wouldn’t pull it out. It looked pretty certain he’d be the nominee.

I didn’t predict any of this. I just had the idea it was happening. And I’m still not predicting anything. But since I read that article in the Times, I’ve had the idea we should be worried.

The clown act may grow stale but now I have the idea the market for what he’s selling might only grow.

For a lot of Trump voters Make America Great Again is a way of saying Make Me Feel Great About Myself, and, after all, that’s something we all need.

A reason to like ourselves.

I don’t think most of us will find it in hating others, but that’s not even an idea I have, let alone a prediction.

It’s just a hope.

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Like I said, the country's full of would-be mini-Trumps. I have the idea they're men mostly, many of them small business owners, but not all, who see something of themselves in Donald Trump and a lot of Donald Trump in themselves, and who encourage themselves---or console themselves---by identifying with him and his success. But here's a guy who over-identifies, and that's putting it mildly. He practically sees himself and Trump as twins separated at birth. At the New York Times: Shunned, Stared at, Still for Trump: The Holdout in Hillary Clinton’s Town.

[Editor's note: The phrase "Squeekpips and notmuchers" in the title of this post is borrowed from from Roald Dahl's The BFG. For some reason it keeps coming back to me whenever I think about Donald Trump's challengers for the Republican nomination. I wonder why.]

Come Wednesday morning, November 9th, a lot people in print, online, and on TV are going to get suddenly very smart in hindsight. I mean that two ways. Some people writing and reporting about politics will be revealed to have been right all along. Some---a lot more, I expect---will discover that they knew it all along, never mind what they wrote or reported back on November 7th and before.

The focus, naturally, will be on how she done done it. Much of it. Much of it, as much if not more, will be on how he done blew it. Republicans and conservatives are going to want to talk more about how their side lost and the political media will still be addicted to Trump for the ratings and clickbait. Then there’s the matter that talking about how she won requires treating her as not just the winner but a winner.

I expect that a lot of what gets said, whichever way people are demonstrating how smart they were in hindsight, will have as a theme: Yes, she won, but she shouldn’t have. She was a terrible candidate and it should have been a Republican year. She was lucky she got to run against Trump.

A good Republican candidate would’ve thrashed her.

I expect this because I’ve seen it already going on.

Among the Republicans a good deal of what they’re saying, writing, and twittering amounts to “Wait till next year!” Losers of all stripes and in all endeavors have a habit of consoling themselves with the all too human perversely self-denigrating “They didn’t win. We lost.” Better for the ego to think of ourselves as having screwed up than having been beaten or, worse, having to admit the other team was just better.

But the mainstream media analysis is sure to be tainted with the sexism that along with racism, has tainted and skewed the coverage the whole campaign season long.

The press corps is still a bastion of white male privilege. They cannot let go of the idea that the United States is a white nation and that white male voters are the only real voters, the only ones who matter, at any rate. That was part of how they were able to cover Trump for so long as if he wasn’t Donald Trump but some hero of the working class of the likes of, well, no Republican who’s run for President has ever been . He had the white male vote therefore he was the candidate of regular Americans or what Sarah Palin calls the Real America. It’s debatable as to whether the sexism was more or less overt, but it was definitely there. A president is a man. A leader is a man. Therefore, Hillary couldn’t be a leader. She could only be and talk too loudly and shrilly. Plus, the political hacks didn’t like her, so they couldn’t believe anybody else did. The biases----biases? Hell. Prejudices!---pro-white, pro-male, anti-Hillary---combined to close their eyes and ears to what was going on. They didn’t hear the voices of all the millions of people who not only liked her but loved her because so many of those voices were female and non-white and they habitually don’t listen to those voices. Those voices aren’t the voices of real America. When the political media hear America singing it’s still the Mitch Miller Singers, an all-male chorus. And all-white.

This would explain something about this professor's prediction that it's still a Republican year and Trump will win. Allan Lichtman, a professor of history at American University, has come up with a series of true/false questions---he calls them keys---whose totaled answers have correctly predicted the results of every presidential election over the past 32 years, going back to Reagan versus Mondale in 1984. That, by the way, covers only eight election, a very small sample size that includes only three elections that match up with this one in having no incumbent in the running, which makes the sampling even smaller. Never mind. One of Lichtman's determining factors is whether or not the parties have nominated candidates who are "charismatic" or national heroes. Lichtman accepts the notion that Hillary Clinton is not charismatic. "Not Franklin Roosevelt," he says. He doesn't say why he thinks she's not charismatic but I would guess it's based on her favorability ratings in the polls and the conventional wisdom of the journalists covering her that she is charmless and unlikable (because she doesn't charm them and they generally don't like her.) Trouble is the polls can’t (or don't) take into account sexist bias of male voters or the enthusiasm of female voters and the journalists can't (or won't) admit to their own sexism and hostility. It doesn't seem to occur to Lichtman that charisma is in the eyes of the beholder or that Hillary Clinton is a national hero to a great many people. He hedges his prediction by noting that his keys are based on history and that Trump is a historical first. There's never been a major party candidate as unsuited to the job for as many reasons as Donald Trump. But he doesn't note that Clinton is a historical first too and in a way that resonates powerfully and positively with millions of women and men. I suspect he doesn't note it because the coverage of the election has pretty much failed to not it or, at any rate, many of the "analysts" in the press corps have failed to take it into account. You would think, though, that a history professor wouldn't take his cues on this from journalists.

On the whole, though, the conviction that this would have been a Republican year if only the GOP had nominated someone more appealing than Trump is based on the fanciful notion that the Republicans had someone more appealing than Trump to nominate and that they could have nominated that someone.

There wasn’t an appealing alternative to Trump. There couldn’t have been. The base didn’t want one.

I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve written that Trump wasn’t saying anything the other candidates weren’t saying. He was just saying it with more passion, more force, more anger, and more style.

The Republican base wanted an angry, racist, loudmouthed demagogue promising to bully and punish everybody the base believes is taking from them their due, a group that includes immigrants and refugees generally and Mexicans and Muslims particularly, Hispanics, African-Americans, women of all colors and ethnic backgrounds, LGBT people, smart people, successful people, liberals, journalists, the disabled, and, as we’ve learned lately, Jews. So, pretty much every American who isn’t a white, reactionary, racist Republican.

None of the other candidates could channel so much anger and hate.

They tried, but for most of them, their hearts weren’t in it.

Only one of Trump’s rivals had established himself as a champion and activist on behalf of the angry, hateful, bigoted, know-nothing base.

Ted Cruz.

Go ahead. Argue he’d have been a more “appealing” candidate than Donald Trump.

But here’s another thing about Cruz.

He was also the only one of Trump’s rivals who had the discipline, organization, money, base---Right Wing Evangelicals may be the only people in America who actually like Ted Cruz---and intelligence, that is, brains plus political savvy, to have won the nomination if Trump hadn’t run.

Hard to swallow, I know, if you’re a liberal. But we don’t like him.

He was, however, and he was, like I said, the only other one who sounded like he meant what he said, because he did.

The only other one with half a chance, I should say.

Mike Huckabee might have meant it. It’s hard to tell with him since he’s a more shameless con man than Trump.

The point is that it was unlikely to the point of impossible that the Republican nominee would have been more appealing than Donald Trump because it was unlikely they would have nominated anybody other than Trump except Cruz.

That's one thing. The other thing is that the idea this should have been a Republican year isn't just based on the supposition that the GOP could have nominate someone other than Trump. It's also based on the supposing the party could have nominated someone other than any of the other sixteen Republicans who were running.

I'm not sure the analysts and pundits doing the supposing know that that's what they're supposing. I think they're still operating under the conventional wisdom that the Republicans entered this election with a "deep bench." That was the Republicans boasting, of course, but the punditocracy accepted it. That "deep bench" meant that more than a handful of the crowd would make strong candidates, strong enough to beat Hillary Clinton, who, of course, was a terrible candidate.

But even if there was a chance the base would have gone for one of them, the fact is that not one of them, except Cruz, wasn’t either an empty suit, a lightweight, or a boob. Most of them were all three.

And here’s another way the media is responsible for Trump.

I should qualify. Nobody is responsible for Trump except Trump himself and the Republican base who embrace him and the Republican establishment who created and empowered that base in order to manipulate and exploit it and then lost control and now can’t summon the courage or principle to reject them, Trump and that base.

But the media have played their part.

The many ways they’ve done it have been addressed by more experienced and wiser heads, but here’s my two-cents.

Trump won partly because the media kept portraying him as a WINNER! He defeated any and all challengers with practically just a wave of his hand and a playground insult. Wow! What a fighter!

Except this image was based on the idea that he faced some really tough challengers.

And this idea was based, like I said, on the media’s accepting the Republicans’ boast that they had a “deep bench.”

I’m not going to bother with Ben Carson, nobody really did. He was just a novelty act, good for ratings and clicks. But at one point there were Very Serious People who took Carly Fiorina seriously.

These are the people the pundits and analysts think Hillary Clinton is a terrible candidate compared to?

All those people the media saw as not just having what it takes, but having a real chance. Even after it became clear Trump was going to win it with only Cruz presenting him any challenge.

As late as January, pundits were touting Chris Christie’s chances, seeing him climbing back into the race (as if he was ever really in it. How many debates had him relegated to the kids’ table?) by winning or at least putting up a good showing in the New Hampshire primary that no poll showed him anywhere near be able to do.

This is another sign of the political media’s failures not just this campaign season but over the last eight years. Many pundits and journalists didn’t just see Chris Christie as a potential president. They thought he’d make a good one.

As they fell by the wayside one by one, political reporters simply moved on to their next favorite, not just oblivious to their previous favorite's failure to appeal to the base---that is to the people who’d be doing the actual voting--and their own failure to identify (or admit) who the base was, but failing to take note of the fact that the challengers were chumps.

Jeb never wanted to run and campaigned, as much as he can be said to have campaigned, as if he couldn’t wait to be beaten, leaving him free to go home to his cozy new cottage in Maine. Perry did not grow suddenly twenty-five IQ points smarter when he started wearing glasses. Walker was never more than a tool of the Koch brothers. Jindal was a failure as governor of Louisiana and besides had shown himself up as a lightweight with his rebuttal to the State of the Union way back in 2009. Rand Paul is a flake. Chris Christie is Chris Christie. The conventional wisdom had it that Marco Rubio was the Republican Barack Obama but that was pure racism of the most patronizing kind. Look, he's a young, handsome non-white Senator too. Why, he's just like Obama! But beside that, Rubio showed himself up as lightweight with his State of the Union rebuttal in 2013. He’s also craven, hypocritical, unprincipled, and, frankly, lazy. The emptiest of empty suits. Oh, and another rich man’s tool.

John Kasich’s appeal has always been overestimated. He’s mean and he’s prone to showing it. But even putting that aside, he’s actually the exception that proves the rule. He’s smart, he’s been a competent governor, he’s popular at home and home is an important swing state, the one a Republican has to win to have a chance of garnering 270 electoral votes. He was the type of appealing, establishment, supposedly moderate candidate who could have beaten Clinton. Polls even showed him doing it. And he got nowhere.

He didn’t hate enough people for the base to take to him. Why, he’d even gone and given health insurance to poor people. Poor people! Never mind how awful he is on issues of women’s rights and health. That's not being mean enough! He wouldn’t let poor people die from not being able to afford to see a doctor!

Then he had the temerity to say it was because he didn’t want to go to hell when he died. The implication wasn’t lost on an important segment of the base.

You don’t tell Right Wing “Christians” you think they’re going to hell.

What it all boils down to is that the media enabled Donald Trump by helping him sell himself as the Winner and Champion of the World or at least of the political scene by having sold all his opponents as worthy challengers.

[Sunday night's editor's note: We try to do our homework here at the Mannionville Blog Shoppe and Wonkery but I goofed up here. I wrote my first draft without going back to re-read the Washington Post interview with Allan Lichtman, thinking I remembered it pretty well and that I would in fact re-read it before I posted. One thing led to another, though, and I posted the draft without doing the re-read. Never blog from memory, folks. I've since re-read the interview and the result is that I've significantly revised the paragraph on Lichtman and his prediction and revised several of the paragraphs that followed it and deleted a couple of others.]

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At McDonald’s for a cup of the world’s best coffee (Good morning, Chris!) and listening to a group of old white guys talking about the election. Different McDonald’s, different group of old white guys. These guys’ conversation is refreshing. Their only interest in Clinton versus Trump is in which way to bet.

Right now their money’s on Clinton. Literally. These guys are gamblers. Most of their conversation’s been about actual horse races. They’ve been discussing which horses to bet on in which races today. One of them is also a high-stakes poker player.

High-stakes is relative. He wins or loses a thousand bucks, give or take, on any given night when he sits down to play. Right now he’s focused on a trip out to Vegas he’s planning. He’s been looking into air fares. He’s found some good deals but he’s complaining about how much various airlines charge for checking baggage. Twenty bucks a bag, one of them wants.

One of the other guys finds his irritation funny. “You'll fly out for a card game, probably blow a thousand bucks on poker, that’s on top of the plane tickets, hotel, and food, and you won't spend twenty bucks to check a bag?”

Poker player’s unfazed. These little things add up, he says. Save twenty bucks here and there, it ends up paying for the other things. Besides, he puts it all on the credit card, so he gets lots of rewards points and frequent flyer miles. These add up too.

That’s been their other main point of discussion. How to rack up rewards points and bonus cash on their credit cards. These guys must all have pretty good credit scores because they all have multiple cards. One of them says he puts everything on the card. Groceries, gas, the utility bills. Pays it all off at the end of the month and just watches the benefits pile up. He says his wife understands the logic of this but can’t bring herself to follow his lead.

The poker player is a bit of a contrarian. Likes to go his own way. He makes his decisions about which ponies to bet based on what he reads in the Daily News in the morning and not what they all talk about when they get together like this. One of the other guys is put out by this. He regards himself as the expert and thinks the poker player would do better listening to his advice.

“Who put you on the fucking races to begin with?”

“I know.”

“I put you on the races, right?”

“I’m just saying.”

What he’s just saying is that the other day, making his bets on his own, according to his own system, he won fifty-three dollars. Two of his horses came in.

Can’t argue with that.

The guys have a mutual friend named Tommy Two-Gun. They turn to talking about Tommy whom one of them doesn’t know. Tommy, it’s explained to him, is much to be admired for his broad breadth of knowledge and the way he’s always expanding it. Tommy is “the eyes and ears of the world.”

“Every fucking thing you want to know, you go to Tommy, he can tell you.”

Joseph Gordon-Levitt, as Ed Snowden, the computer analyst and programmer who exposed the U.S. government's mass surveillance of American citzens , wearing an expression as blank and unreadable as the movie he’s starring in often is itself, Oliver Stone’s untypically understated Snowden.

I wasn’t looking forward to seeing Snowden. With apologies to Matt Zoller Seitz, I’ve never been much of an Oliver Stone fan. I find his movies too...loud. And insistent. And he's too much of a believer in the idea of the Last Honest Man. I feel like all his movies tend to be about how one noble and innocent man, after temporarily losing his way, redeems himself by taking on and defeating the SYSTEM or in being defeated by it.

Of course that’s not entirely true. At any rate, it’s not true of Nixon.

But Salvador, Platoon, Wall Street, Born on the Fourth of July, The Doors, JFK, Any Given Sunday, even Talk Radio fit the pattern. I probably could make the case that Natural Born Killers is his own dark parody of the same theme.

And hand in glove with the Last Honest Man theme is Stone’s vision of America as a generally dark and sinister place ruled by a shadowy and corrupt elite made up of ruthless and power-hungry schemers, thieves, mass murderers, and madmen, and in that Nixon does fit the pattern. Richard Nixon and Nixon’s America are the implicit or explicit evils at work in all those other movies.

There are too many days when I agree with Stone on this and it’s one of the things I go to the movies to escape, that grim, cynical, despairing sense that Nixon won.

So I was expecting more of the same from Snowden. But it wasn’t just the existential dread I was dreading.

I was dreading that Stone would try to make a hero of Edward Snowden, and I just can’t bring myself to think of Snowden as a hero.

This says more about my own orneriness than about anything else. I think a lot of liberals need to see Edward Snowden as a hero the way a lot of conservatives needed to see Chris Kyle as a hero. And I want no part of that. They’re both too complicated, flawed, and all too human. I’ve always seen Snowden as an idealistic and well-meaning but naive young man who tried to do a good thing, by his lights, and did it badly in a way that ended up screwing himself and tainting his cause.

I’ve also never been sure exactly what good he hoped to do or how much good he actually accomplished.

I don’t know which side in the debate to trust either. The government’s argument has been we need to do what we’re doing in order to stop the terrorists but don’t worry we’re not overstepping, which is not the kind of reassurance the government should expect people to just accept. What government has ever not overstepped? And they've released no evidence that spying on everybody has worked or that it's necessary. It didn’t help get bin Laden and the major terrorist threats that we know failed---the shoe bomb that didn’t go off, the underwear bomb that didn’t go off, the Times Square bomb that didn’t go off---were thwarted mainly by accident and the terrorists’ own incompetence.

On the other side, the argument seems to be that nothing the government does to protect us is worth the assault on our civil rights and privacy---brave words, but seem to me to come out of a sense that there's nothing to protect us from.

I figured I’d sit through the movie feeling as frustrated and manipulated and pulled in too many directions by the story Stone was telling as I’d felt by the real story as I heard it told in the news and online all along.

Didn’t seem like a fun way to spend a couple hours.

In the end I felt I had to go so I could write about it in order to maintain my standing as a dutiful liberal blogger. In other words, I went as homework. Not the best reason to go to a movie.

Turned out it wasn’t the kind of Oliver Stone movie I was dreading. It wasn’t loud. It wasn't insistent. It didn't beat me over the head with its arguments. It was even nuanced. And parts of it were quite...sweet.

A nice surprise, at the beginning. By the midway point, though, I was wishing it was that kind of Oliver Stone movie simply because it would have been more exciting and fun. As it is, Snowden is as low-key, reticent, unforthcoming, emotionally reserved to the point of repressed, and monotone as its portrayal of Edward Snowden himself.

But...while in certain ways it's still a typical Oliver Stone movie, including its being about another Last Honest Man, whether or not it’s a typical Oliver Stone movie and whether or not I’m an Oliver Stone fan doesn’t matter. What matters is that I’m a Joseph Gordon-Levitt fan and Snowden features what’s becoming a typically excellent Joseph Gordon-Levitt performance.

Gordon-Levitt’s Snowden is watchful, self-contained, maybe not emotionally repressed but definitely willfully undemonstrative. He rarely seems to smile on his own volition. A smile is a reflexive reaction he should have controlled. When he’s made to smile---and it’s always as if he's been made to, against his will and better judgment---there’s a look in his eye that’s partly regret and partly amused admiration for whatever or whoever’s forced him to smile, as if he’s been fooled by a card trick he should have known better than to fall for but he still can’t help enjoying the trick and having been tricked in spite of himself. And he talks openly only a little more often than he smiles. He says only what he has to say. He has vibrant inner life but he’s determined to keep it to himself. He’s an intellectual and a voracious reader. He thinks deeply and philosophically about what he reads. But you have to work hard to get him to talk about it. You have to work hard to get him to talk, period. When he does speak it’s with a slight, barely perceptible hesitation, and with a studying look in his eyes, as if he’s scouting the path a sentence is going to take for holes to avoid stepping in and roots to avoid tripping over. It’s as if he’s hooked himself up to an inner lie detector test to ensure that everything he’s about to say---and feel---is truthful and accurate. A conversation style that cuts down on small talk. That’s the point. Talking just for the sake of talking is when you’re likely to give yourself away.

Not that Snowden has anything to hide---when we first meet him, at any rate. He’s not deceitful. He’s not particularly shy, either, and not naturally taciturn. His reticence is more like a point of principle. His business is his business, and yours is yours. He’s the living embodiment of the principle he’s ultimately going to ruin his life defending. No one gets to pry into anyone else’s life without explicit, specific, and limited permission.

Conversations should be about practical matters at hand, and he’s not just willing but eager to talk about those. He’ll gladly go into detail about what he’s working on---if you have the security clearance and he’s judged you smart enough and competent enough to follow him. He just won’t tell you why he’s working on it and for whom he’s doing the work.

Temperamentally, intellectually, emotionally, and, as it turns out, politically and ideologically he’s suited for working for the NSA and the CIA, which is to say essentially as a spy and an eager volunteer in the cyberwar on terror. Edward Snowden, I was surprised to learn, was a Republican and a libertarian when he started out in the intelligence business.

The problem, he learns to his own dismay, is that the nature of the work he has to do, and wants to do, and is proud to do and be able to do, is in conflict with his own nature.

As it happens, at this critical point in his life he falls in love with someone who in her own way is as all wrong for him as it’s becoming clear his job is all wrong for him.

His job requires him to treat everyone else’s business--and it’s literally everyone else’s business---as his business. Being in love with the politically liberal artist and professional free-spirit Lindsay Mills, played charmingly, exuberantly, and winsomely---but not too---winsomely by Shailene Woodley, means allowing his business to become her business and through her the business of everyone else or, at any rate, anyone else she whimsically decides to share it with it and, given her nature, that could mean literally everyone else.

If Snowden’s motto is “Nothing about me is your business”, hers is “Everything about me is not only your business but something I expect you’ll find totally fascinating.”

Good liberal though she might be, she isn’t the least bit worried about the government’s spying on her or on anybody because she not only doesn’t have anything to hide, she doesn’t hide anything. Puts her whole life online, practically uploading her soul and personality, a virtual her who’s even more open and free-spirited and uninhibited as the analog her.

She’s an exhibitionist. Her whole life is a work of performance art. Multi-talented, her art of the moment is photography and she’s using her camera to chronicle her life. Snowden, as an important part of her life, is an important part of the chronicle. He must be photographed. Continually. Her favorite model. She adores him as a person so she adores him as a subject. He has to perform for her. For her camera, at any rate. He has to smile. And despite himself, he does. He even begins to enjoy it, both smiling and performing for her.

So, even though at first glance in one way she’s all wrong for him, she’s in this way just right for him. She frees him up to be more himself. She brings him out of himself, gets him out and about in the world, shows him how to have fun and enjoy what life offers beyond work. It’s the old, old story going back to Pride and Prejudice. Creative and intelligent and passionate free-spirited young woman finds true love and happiness by saving a dour, emotionally repressed, all work and no play from himself and the stodgy, conventional boring life he’s headed for. It’s an old story but a good story.

Trouble is it’s usually a funny story.

Pride and Prejudice is a comedy. Bringing Up Baby, another version the old, old story, is a farce. Buried in Snowden is a comedy called When Eddie Met Lindsay or Pride and Prejudice and Programming. Edward Snowden is a Mister Darcy who’s a genius computer programmer addicted to his work. Lindsay Mills is an Elizabeth Bennett who takes nude selfies and posts them on the internet. They get together, despite themselves, and live happily if somewhat complicatedly ever after.

This would be fine if only the story around them had also been a comedy. It could have been one too, if Stone had chosen to see it that way. There is something farcical about the government’s “Let’s spy on everybody!” plan to combat terror. And the character who serves as the movie’s central villain, a CIA operative named O’Brian and Snowden’s suave and sophisticated but sinister mentor, brilliantly played by Rhys Ifans, is in his essentials a comic villain.

With his long lupine face topped off by snow white hair combed boyishly forward, he looks like Draco Malfoy whom no one has told is now middle-aged and a lot less pretty than he was when he and Harry Potter last crossed wands---an effect probably emphasized in my mind by Gordon-Levitt’s looking as though the part of Snowden was between him and Daniel Radcliffe and Stone told him he’d only cast him if he played it as a grown-up and grown Severus Snape-grim Harry. The improbable hair cut hints at the man’s vanity as well as his phoniness.

Feeling professionally obligated to keep his true self hidden and to appear in the world in disguise, he’s chosen for his primary false identity to disguise himself as someone twenty years younger. In another of his guises, he’s a Hemingwayesque outdoorsman and hunter. (For this one he wears a Stetson that looks as improbable on him as the haircut.) He’s also, at various times, a bon vivant and man of the world and a country club-style hale fellow well met type of 19th hole regular as gregarious and sycophantic as if he’s congratulating business contacts he’s let beat him at golf. (This one seems to be real in that it’s something he really does as part of his spy craft.)

The role he plays most often with Snowden is that of wise to the ways of the world and magic wizard instructing an apprentice, Merlin to Snowden’s Arthur, Dumbledore to Harry, Obi-wan---the haircut is also reminiscent of Alec Guinness’s wig in the original Star Wars movies---to his Luke.

All of these disguises are self-flattering and self-aggrandizing and there’s comedy to be found in his inflated view of himself. But it’s also a wonder that he can keep them all straight and doesn’t occasionally play the wrong part at the wrong time for the wrong audience and that could have been funny, his getting mixed up from time to time. A few more good jokes and with Stone pushing him to ham it up a bit more---or giving him permission to. Ifans probably wouldn’t have needed much prodding or direction. He is British, after all, (Well, Welsh, technically, but so was Burton) and the Brits are taught how to be hams as part of their basic training as actors.---and O’Brian would have been a funny bad guy.

But even though there are funny moments in Snowden, Stone doesn’t find any of the larger story amusing. That’s one of the reasons I’m not a fan. There’s never much he finds amusing. That’s ok, though. Not all love stories are comedies. Young lovers who would have had happy endings if only the grown-ups had stayed out of it are regularly in story and song brought to sorrow and grief. (See Romeo and Juliet.) For stretches of the movie, it looks as though that’s what’s going to happen to Snowden and Mills. His work is going to break them up, break their spirits, and break their hearts. There’s even a tragic flaw within their love for each other that would have helped that to happen.

As good as she is for him in one way, she’s bad for him in another, because, despite her being a liberal hippie in comparison to him, she’s a spoiled rich girl used to living well and traveling in the “right” social circles. His job allows for both and she likes that.

As O’Brian’s protégé he’s invited into the homes of the Beltway elite where he meets and is taken a shine to by important and Very Serious People who are happy to boost his career. When he gives up government work only to go back to work for the government as a consultant, his salary jumps and he and Mills are suddenly very flush with money. At first, Snowden’s not impressed by either the money or the social advancement. But he is impressed by how it makes her happy. And, under her influence, he begins to like it too, both the money and the social success.

On top of this, Mills is a bit of a vicarious thrill-seeker and she pushes him to go out into the field and do some actual spying.

This leads to what I think is the best section of Snowden, almost a movie within the movie that could have been expanded into the plot of an entire Hitchcockian thriller focused wholly Snowden and Mills as a pair of innocents caught up in intrigue and adventure.

Snowden is sent to Austria---setting of The Third Man---where he teams up with a charming but oily, hedonistic, and morally bankrupt operative, played by a leering and cheerfully dissolute Timothy Olyphant to manipulate an innocent banker into giving them information about a would-be terrorist. The banker isn’t connected to the terrorist himself. He has family connections who have connections to people who have connections to people who...you get the picture. He himself has no idea how he’s connected at such a remove, but Snowden and his partner get to those connections through his daughter. This leads to tragedy and Snowden’s first serious crisis of conscience.

There Stone had, a story, if he’d wanted to tell it, about a pair of lovers who are tempted by money, status, and the pure thrill of behaving amorally and either fall into corruption or are saved from it by their own innate decency or the intervention of angels in human form, a tragedy or a comedy, whichever way he chose. He chose to go back to his main story about Snowden standing up to the System. That could have been a tragedy or a comedy too. Except for one hitch. Neither the tragedy nor the comedy happen because neither did happen.

You’d think that wouldn’t have been a problem for him since what really happened has never stopped him before from telling the story he wanted to tell and making the points he was determined to make.

But this time it did. Stone let himself be blocked by reality.

The real Snowden and Mills seem to be living out a romantic comedy. Who knows if they’ll live happily ever after, but from all appearances they’re living pretty happily in the here and now, despite the inconvenience of their Russian exile. The System gets taken down and Snowden and Mills survive as individuals and as a couple, leaving Stone with a love story that’s neither comic nor tragic just kind of sweet, interrupted too often by a not particularly dramatic historical drama.

Again, there’s a way he could have dealt with this. The one I suggested earlier. He could have the plot that surrounds the romance a comedy too or, at least, comedic.

For reasons I can only guess at, he didn’t do that. But then he didn’t do what I’d actually expected him to do. Treat the whole thing as a typical Oliver Stone overwrought melodrama.

There’s a surprising matter-of-factness to his storytelling in Snowden. A this happened, then this happened, then that happened straight-forwardness that not only cuts down on the suspense but causes the movie to resist emotional involvement.

How are we supposed to feel about all of this?

The answer seems to be a bit of a shrug.

Feel?

Ok. Then how about think? What are we supposed to think?

Another shrug.

I was dreading going to Snowden because I expected Stone would try to be as emotionally manipulative and intellectually dishonest---in the cause of dragging the audience to the right side---as he’s often been. I didn’t want to be imaginatively wrestled into taking Snowden’s side and cheering him on as a hero. But I think I would have enjoyed that better.

Stone seems to be way too willing to let the facts speak for themselves for once. In truth, he seems barely interested in presenting the facts at all. At any rate, he doesn’t do much to dramatize them, let alone over-dramatize them in keeping with what I’ve always thought is his idiom. He appears to take it for granted we know all we need to know about the government’s massive data gathering enterprises and that we disapprove on intellectual, constitutional, and moral grounds, and he doesn’t have to work to make us disapprove.

The result is some rather desultory storytelling with many confusing and lazy plot twists and turns. Details and events have to be left out, compressed, or elided in all historical movies for the sake of time and in order not to overwhelm the audience with facts as if in a well-meaning but counterproductive effort to help us cram for a final exam. But in Snowden those left-out details and events aren’t compensated for either imagistically or through poetic license. This happened, then that happened, then...this happened. Wait? What? How did we get to that last this happened? What happened during the ellipses?

We’ll have to go back and read the books.

As for Snowden himself and what good he did...or harm…

On this point, as with the other, Stone seems to take it for granted that since we already agree that what the government was doing was wrong on principle, then we already agree that what Snowden did to put a stop to it was right on principle, and therefore Ed Snowden is a champion of truth, justice, and the American way on principle and we will cheer for him in the end on principle.

I don’t like to go to movies on principle. I went to this one on the principle I needed to do my homework for the blog and I wasn’t looking forward to being manipulated. But I would rather be manipulated into cheering for the hero than being expected to do it on principle. And that’s what I missed watching Snowden, Stone’s old manipulative tricks.

I missed his special pleadings. I missed his tampering with history and the histrionics that usually go with it. I missed his very dark view of America. The government as presented in Snowden is generally incompetent while being too competent at the wrong things, corrupt but only routinely so and mainly because individual actors are corrupt, and generally wrongheaded to the point of stupidity. Which is why I think it could have been treated comically. But it isn’t actively evil. And it isn’t anybody, really. President Obama appears in clips that show him saying things we now know were official lies. But that’s all they are, official lies of the sort any and all political leaders engage in as a matter of course. There’s no George W. Bush here, no Dick Cheney. I didn’t miss them, particularly. But I missed there being real villains.

This morning. Around 8:30. Saw this in the parking lot of McDonald’s as I swung through the drive-thru to grab some coffee---Yes, Chris. It’s still the best coffee in the world. Stickers may be a little hard to read. I need to get a real camera. Let me help you out with a sample…

The one down on the right hand corner of the bumper says “Welcome to America. Now Either Learn English or Leave.”

Up in the right hand corner of the rear window: “NRA Stand and Fight” and that’s a picture of a .45 automatic next to “Piece Be With You”.

All the stickers look as though they’ve been on there for a long time, weathered, faded, peeling. The "Save Freedom. Stop Hillary” one looks as though it could be left over from 2008 or even from her last Senate run in 2006, although I don’t think the truck itself is that old. All I think this means is that these are long-standing sentiments for the owner and not necessarily feelings ignited by this election. I think we can guess who this guy’ll be voting for, but he seems to be a single-issue voter. Guns really matter to him.

You might be asking yourself, as I did, who could be so frightened and paranoid that he needs to express his gun-nuttery like this? You might also be asking yourself, as I also did, who would mess up an otherwise handsome pickup with all those ugly stickers? Never mind what they say. They just ruin the look of the truck.

Actually, I have a pretty good idea who owns the truck or, at any rate, I’m fairly sure he’s one of a half-dozen or so regular customers, a group of men, white men, in their 60s, I see here from time to time. They like to talk politics. Which is to say they like to complain about how the country’s going to hell in a handcart and it’s all THEIR fault. One of them talks very loudly. But I don’t think he’s the owner. Tell you why.

He talks like one of Limbaugh’s dittoheads which makes me think he’s like Limbaugh himself. Somebody who’s always been all talk, no action. The owner of the pick-up has seen action.

One of the stickers says: “Death Smiles at Everyone. Marines Smile Back.”

Down in the left hand corner of the bumper: “USMC Sniper.”

I have a feeling the subtext of all the stickers is a lot sadder than simply "Vote Trump".

Team of Rivals: Lincoln goes over the Emancipation Proclamation with his cabinet. Sitting across the table directly opposite him is his Hillary Clinton, political rival, turned advisor, turned friend, Secretary of State William Seward.

So much of greater import is going on that carping about one dumb Tweet by MIke Pence boasting of being a member of the Party of Lincoln seems as trivial as Mike Pence himself, but it’s been eating at me and I know I won’t be able to write about anything else until I write this one out of my system, so here goes...

On top of that, what did I need to see? Whatever good Presidential debates do, if any besides providing an evening of political theater, they do it for people who haven’t been following the election all that closely until time of the debates or who truly haven’t yet made up their minds. I don’t fall into either category, so see above. I didn’t watch the first debate either. Probably won’t watch the last debate. Again, see above.

Of course, I keep half an eye on Twitter as they go along and I catch up the next day, reading all about it in the newspapers and online and watching a few clips. So I get the news. But I miss the drama and political theater. Generally a good thing for my mental health but politics is political theater. Trump’s sniffing and stalking are important parts of the debates. So was the appearance of the sweater guy. And too much of what I read is colored by analysis. And not everything makes it into every story, so I miss stuff.

Like the mini-debate about Lincoln and Lincoln, the president and the movie, and private positions versus public ones.

Over at Bill Moyers.com, Neal Gabler breaks down what Clinton said and argues she was making an important point about how politics and governance work in the real world. Of course I agree it’s an important point, it’s just not one that sounds good or plays well on TV or the stump. Too wonkish and...pragmatic, a word that, as we learned in the Democratic primaries, is nearly synonymous with cynical, corrupt, and defeatist. Idealism’s antonym. Almost as bad as neo-liberal and incremental. It’s going to sound worse too when the Clinton Rules are in effect, which they always are. If a Clinton says it, does it, thinks it it’s suspect to the point of convicting, even if it’s something other politicians routinely say, do, and think to cheers and applause. Even if Abraham Lincoln said it, did it, or thought it. Clinton was simply pointing out that politics and governance are hard and tricky businesses, as Lincoln, a master of both, well understood, and she has tried to learn how the trick is done from Lincoln’s example. She wasn’t comparing herself explicitly to Lincoln. Even Trump got that.

But he still got off a pretty good laugh line based on his seeming to think that what she said sounded to him like it probably sounded to most people listening with half an ear, like a justification for lying.

As it happens, Trump has compared himself to Lincoln. He’s probably forgotten, if he was even paying attention to what he was saying when he did it. That he’s often not listening to himself would explain how he’s routinely able to straight-facedly deny he’s said something he’s on video saying. Back in March he compared himself to Lincoln in the matter of presidential comportment. Seems some people think Trump doesn’t act presidential. Trump is aware of this, and he defended himself that night beside a stack of Trump steaks he was hawking by way of fundraising. He admitted that maybe he wasn’t acting all that presidential now, but, he said, just watch him when he gets to the White House. With the humility for which he’s known, he conceded he couldn’t be a presidential as Lincoln. But if Lincoln was our most presidential president, as Trump implied he believes, then he, himself, Donald Trump, would come in a close second.

“I can be more presidential than anybody, if I want to be,” Trump said. “More presidential than anybody, other than the great Abe Lincoln. He was very presidential.”

Considering that Trump usually boasts he’s the best at anything, this was an extremely humble admission.

But think about it.

“More presidential than anybody”?

More presidential than the forty-two other presidents?

That would include George Washington.

Trump thinks he could be more presidential than George Washington?

If he wanted to be, apparently.

Never mind.

Hillary said what she said. Trump pounced. He got his laugh. The debate moved on and that was mostly that. All over and forgotten by almost everybody. There were other things to talk about the next morning. Much more of greater significance had happened at the debate and there was the sweater guy. Trump was declared the loser and he took that with his usual grace, continuing to “joke” about locking Hillary up when he’s elected and otherwise setting to work trying to incite armed insurrection and undermine the legitimacy of the coming election that now looks more and more like it will give the country a second President Clinton. The public position versus private position argument has been set aside probably until the pundit class needs it to enforce another Clinton Rule against that second President Clinton. Maybe they won’t be able to wait and they’ll use it to try the patience of the second President-elect Clinton while she’s busy assembling her own team of rivals. I gather from some of my usual sources that a few tenacious pundits not as insightful or sympathetically disposed as Gabler have since tried to explain what Clinton meant and why she was wrong and then set her straight, their analyses mainly based on their own half-remembered high school history lessons, what they sort of remember some historians said Spielberg got wrong back when the movie came out, and what they vaguely recalled gleaning from their skimming of Team of Rivals back after the 2008 election when Obama’s people made sure it was known that the president-elect was reading that book as he was putting together his cabinet, intending to put into practice what he’d learned from Lincoln’s pragmatic example.

I don’t know if anyone else noted what I’m about to note, which is that within Clinton’s exposition there is an actual comparison to be made to Lincoln, the movie and the history, but it’s not between herself and Lincoln himself. It’s between herself and William Seward, Lincoln’s main rival for the Republican nomination in 1860, who became his Secretary of State, ardent admirer, good friend, and trusted adviser.

At any rate, the issue's gone for now. I’d be paying it no more mind myself, except…

In case you can't see the tweet, it shows a photo of Pence looking like a white-haired GI Joe with the words in quotes over it: "As a member of the Party Lincoln, I'd really prefer if Dishonest Hillary didn't associate herself with Honest Abe." And underneath: "Hillary Clinton is no Honest Abe."

Let’s set aside for the moment how rich it is that Mike Pence is associating himself with Honest Abe, considering that his job these days is to be chief apologist for the most brazen and malicious liar ever nominated for President---and keep mind that Richard Nixon also belonged to the Party of Lincoln---and that Pence “won” his debate with Tim Kaine (at least in the eyes of the pundits) by lying his way through it non-stop. When I saw what Pence had tweeted, my first thought, after all the expletives deleted, was to wonder if Mike Pence knows the history of his “Party of Lincoln”?

Does he know that it became the anti-immigrant party very soon after Lincoln died?

Does he know about the “Compromise” of 1877 that put Republican Rutherford B. Hayes in the White House in exchange for ending Reconstruction, the beginning of the GOP’s first Southern Strategy?

Does he know that the GOP welcomed into the party the likes of Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms with wide-open arms?

Does he know what liberty Barry Goldwater was calling upon Republicans to be extreme in the defense of?

Does he know his is the party of "States Rights"? Does he know what Lincoln thought of that idea?

Does he know what "States Rights" means to the people who're constantly invoking it?

Does he know what it means that his party was defending the Confederate Flag up until, oh, today?

Does he remember that his party, the Party of Honest Abe, nominated Richard Nixon for president three times?

Does he know about Nixon’s Southern Strategy? Does he know what it was?

Does he know what Richard Nixon was? Does he know who he was?

For that matter, does he know who Abraham Lincoln was?

Of course Pence can (probably) identify Lincoln as the 16th President, the one who ended slavery and saved the Union but…

Can he tell us a single fact about what Abe believed or thought beyond what he learned in grade school or picked up from the movie---although he’s got a history of missing the point when it comes to taking away a lesson from a movie---or gleaned from his own skimming of Team of Rivals, if he even skimmed it, if he even knew everybody else in Washington was skimming it and why?

Beside the Gettysburg Address and, maybe a few lines from the Second Inaugural, can he quote or even paraphrase anything Lincoln wrote or said?

As I know you know, Mike Pence is the soon-to-be former governor of Indiana. Effectively, he’s been the former governor of Indiana since he was foisted upon Trump as his running mate. If the Indiana election could have been held the day before Pence find a lifeboat aboard the ticket, he’d have been the ex-governor already. There are numerous humiliations that go along with being Trump’s vice-presidential nominee, but at least he’s spared the humiliation of losing a re-election bid. He’s not popular in Indiana these days.

Indiana can claim Lincoln as one of its own. He grew up there. Lived there from when he was seven until he was twenty-one. When Mrs M and I lived in Indiana, Lincoln was as revered and celebrated among Hoosiers, at least officially, as Larry Bird, although not nearly as much as Bobby Knight.

But we lived in Fort Wayne. Pence grew up in Columbus, Indiana. Nice town, I hear, but it’s down in the part of the state that was the Copperhead South, an area he represented in Congress too. Fort Wayne was settled by New Englanders and German and Irish immigrants moving west along the Erie and Wabash canals. The southern parts of the state were settled by Southerners, Scotch-Irish from Kentucky and Tennessee, a group that included Lincoln’s family. Lincoln himself was born in Kentucky. The headquarters for Lincoln National Life Insurance was in Fort Wayne and there was a fine little Lincoln museum in the building, but Pence is from what is more truly Lincoln country than Fort Wayne. But I can’t tell you what they thought of Lincoln down there when Pence was growing up. I imagine he was revered but in the same way a lot of Catholics revere the saints and apostles, without giving much thought as to who and what they were as actual human beings.

But for all I know, Mike Pence is full up with Lincoln lore. Lincoln might be his favorite movie. He might not have skimmed Team of Rivals but read it cover to cover. He might devour every new Lincoln biography that comes along and one of the many things he regrets about all the lying he’s had to do for Donald Trump is it hasn’t left him time to readA Self-Made Man, the first volume of Sidney Blumenthal’s new biography of Honest Abe.

If that’s the case, if Pence is more of a student of Lincoln’s life than I’d expect, then somewhere in all his reading he must have come across this passage from a letter Lincoln wrote to his friend Joshua Speed in 1855, when the party of Lincoln at the time, the one he belonged to and worked hard for, the Whigs, was coming apart, torn between its anti-slavery wing and the faction that became known as the Know-Nothings. The Know-Nothings were nativists and anti-Catholics furious at the common cause Whig party leaders were making with anti-slavery German immigrants. Lincoln wrote to Speed:

“I am not a Know-Nothing. That is certain. How could I be? How can any one who abhors the oppression of negroes, be in favor of degrading classes of white people? Our progress in degeneracy appears to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that ‘all men are created equal.’ We now practically read it, ‘all men are created equal, except negroes.’When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read, ‘all men created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and catholics.’ When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty---to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, without the base alloy of [hypocrisy].”

And maybe Pence even knows that this, sadly, was Lincoln’s private position. Publicly, Lincoln did not criticize the Know-Nothings because he was calculating that the Whigs needed them in order to survive and win the elections necessary to gaining the political offices and power that would allow them to end slavery.

Maybe.

If Pence ever did read the letter, its lesson didn’t stick. Mike Pence isn’t just an apologist and designated clean-up liar for the current know-nothing nominee of the “Party of Lincoln,” he’s a dedicated know-nothing himself who has literally attempted to get the Declaration of Independence to read, at least in Indiana, “All persons are created equal except women, LGBT people, and refugees.”

Mike Pence is the worst, as Melissa McEwan, a native Hoosier all too familiar with what it's like to live in that Pence-benighted state, says and shows in this Storyfy-ication of her Tweetstorm reacting to Pence’s reaction to President Obama’s speech at the Democratic Convention in July.

David Duke has endorsed Donald Trump. At one point Honest Donald claimed to know nothing about it. Any of it. Duke. The Klan. White supremacists. He drew a complete blank.

"I don’t know anything about David Duke, okay," Trump said. "I don’t know anything about what you’re even talking about with white supremacy or white supremacists. I don't know, did he endorse me? Or what's going on. Because I know nothing about David Duke. I know nothing about white supremacists."

At the time he said that he’d already disavowed Duke and his endorsement.

So he told a lie when for once the truth would have been more to his credit.

Lincolnesque.

More presidential than George Washington.

Here’s a bit of Hoosier trivia Mike Pence might know.

In the 1920s, Indiana was one of the largest and most politically powerful Klan strongholds outside the South, and in Indiana the Klan was Republican.

I’m not saying Mike Pence is a member of the Klan. Not implying it either. No apophasis intended. The Klan’s heyday in Indiana was decades ago. But through Trump Pence is now associated with the Klan and he ought to be strenuous in disassociating himself instead of complaining of Twitter about Dishonest Hillary’s associating herself with Honest Abe. The real point however, is that it’s been a very long time since the Republican Party was truly the Party of Lincoln.

If it still was, though, I don’t think Mike Pence would be bragging of his association with it.

And I don’t think Republicans would be flattered by his association with them.

Even though they were Southerners, the Lincolns---Thomas, Abraham’s difficult and distant father, and Sarah, his loving, protective, and intellectually nurturing step-mother---were anti-slavery. They called themselves “Emancipationists” and it was a religious principle with them. They were stalwarts of an Emancipationist church. Abraham Lincoln was raised to hate slavery as an offense to God. He wasn’t particularly religious as an adult. Some called him an infidel. Called himself that sometimes. May have cost him more votes in some precincts in the elections he ran in than his anti-slavery views. But the conviction that slavery was immoral stuck with him as the central tenet of what was left of his personal faith. Later in life, when he was president, he wrote in a letter, “I am naturally anti-slavery[.] If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. I cannot remember a time when I did not so think and feel.” And as he wrote to Joshua Speed, how could he abhor the oppression of one class of people and be in favor of degrading any other? In the opening of the Gettsyburg Address---and surely even Mike Pence can quote this part---“Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal”---when he said all men, he meant all, and in the phrase that concludes the address---“government of the people, by the people, for the people”---the people were WE the People, all of us.

That’s become our private and public positions as people and as a nation, that we are a WE. And it’s only in seeing ourselves that way, as all of us belonging to the same WE, that we’re all members of the Party of Lincoln.

Just so you know how lucky my students are, Brian Switek, the tweeter of this tweet and author of the article tweeted in the tweet, is the virtually guest lecturing in my Digital Commoners class tomorrow.

Found this one from back in June adrift in the Twitter stream. It’s from shortly after he’d sewed up the nomination and was beginning to establish his pattern of following up a good day for him with a public meltdown. I’ve hauled it ashore and patched up some leaks with some consultation of the notebooks and am relaunching it because I’m kind of proud of it and, unfortunately, it's still relevant.

What would happen if Trump picked a popular, qualified vp, started talking only abt need to change DC, middle class, Hillary=status quo?

There’s been no presidential pivot. There’s not going to be a presidential pivot. There never was going to be a presidential pivot. The reason is simple. Donald Trump is never going to stop being Donald Trump.

Many members of the political press corps, not just the egregious Mark Halperin, still haven’t gotten their heads around this. Many who have still haven’t come to terms with it and don’t know how to continue to cover this election except in the same way they’ve covered past elections---badly and shallowly, as horseraces and performance art, focusing on personality and process and who’s up and who’s down in the polls today, ignoring issues and the candidates’ proposed policies as much as as possible and never, ever coming close to making a call as to who’s right and who’s wrong, whose policies would work and whose are unworkable, except when they can make it sound like the Democrat is wrong even when she’s right because, as we all know, she’s inauthentic. She’s not in touch with regular Americans and, never mind what she plans to do, she’s a terrible a candidate and people don’t like her. This has to be said over and over again, as if it’s a fact and not a self-defensive excuse. It has to be done for the sake of “balance” because God forbid anyone accuse journalists of having a liberal bias.

But Trump with all his awfulness, his shameless demagoguing, his constant, brazen, and borderline psychopathic lying, his racism, xenophobia, sexism, know-nothingism, and general hatefulness, makes covering this one like any other nearly impossible. What’s a poor objective journalist trying to describe his view from nowhere to do?

Pray.

Pray he’ll change. Pray he’ll transform right before our eyes into a version of a Republican that doesn’t exist. That idealized avatar of Ronald Reagan whom too many members of the press corps pine nostalgically for. That genial, twinkly-eyed, fatherly moderate and pragmatist. The Reagan who didn’t mean anything he said. The Reagan who didn’t do his no small bit to help push the GOP farther to the ideological and racist right. The Reagan who didn’t try to sell an Us vs Them vision of America. The Reagan who didn’t blather about Welfare Queens and Young Bucks and how government wasn’t the answer it was the problem, government happening to be in our democracy how we all work together to make this that Shining City on a Hill he also blathered on about.

That Ronald Reagan.

That’s the one they want to take over Trump’s body and infuse it with something resembling a soul.

Only one way that’s going to happen. But I wouldn’t go searching in the basement any time soon.